MiSyte

The roller coaster of owning a job

Jamie Gilleland began MiSyte.com as a local and regional web design company and, like many small business owners, needed the flexibility of ownership to accommodate raising her young family at the time.

“It was a roller coaster!” Jamie recalls. “You’d sell hard for a month, get five or six new clients, then spend the next month building and delivering and trying to get these new sites launched. And you know how small business owner clients can be — busy, busy, busy! — so there were many times we’d have simple five-page website projects strung out over periods of three and four months!

“It got hard to manage, and you didn’t get final payment until you launched. As I got more successful, I had to create systems and cobbled together software to try to help me handle things. It’s one thing to manage four or five projects, it’s nearly impossible to handle twenty or thirty.”

The problems pile up

Like millions of other small businesses, Jamie had never designed MiSyte.com’s systems to handle high volume. She’d built herself a job and merely adopted software that could handle the volume her family schedule allowed.

In those early days, Jamie didn’t think in terms of “scaling” or “ideal clients” or even the “customer journey” her prospects were embarking on. MiSyte.com paid the bills, and that was “enough.” Until it wasn’t.

“By 2014, I was really sick of it,” Jamie says. “I was tired of the sales roller coaster, I was tired of having to rely on antiquated lead generation and word-of-mouth, and candidly, I was tired of doing “okay.” My knowledge of technology — and even Keap — told me there were better ways to run my business, but I couldn’t see how to get to that point. I hated to spend money in the business, even if I unconsciously knew it was going to make me money.

“My rationale was always, ‘Why buy something when there are free apps that will do almost the same thing?’

“Looking back, that type of thinking caused me to spend more time implementing half-built solutions than making money and growing my business.

“When I actually learned what Keap could do and I committed to buying it and using it, something in my mind clicked,” Jamie admits.

That “something” was the desire to grow her company to be far more than simply a local or regional website company. It was the desire to have more, to be more, and to show more small business owners that they NEVER have to settle for “enough.”

That commitment paid off. One year after implementing Keap, MiSyte’s monthly revenue equaled their previous year’s annual revenue.

Working “on” the business

12x annual growth didn’t happen by accident. In the first year alone, Jamie used Keap to:

• Eliminate all her “low cost” apps — which added up to nearly $600/month — and consolidate everything into Keap for half the cost.
• Stop transcription errors and close multiple holes where potential sales could be lost due to bad data, now that all data was housed inside of Keap.
• Automate repetitive tasks, resulting in an estimated time savings of 30 hours per month, allowing the principals to concentrate on business development instead of simply fulfillment. (As Michael E. Gerber of The E-Myth says, “working ON your business, not IN your business.”)

“What Keap really gave me was time,” says Jamie. “Time to re-evaluate the MiSyte.com business model. And when I was finally able to do that, I figured out how to get off the ‘sell and fulfill’ merry-go-round.

“We looked at our business model, we were able to hire our first business coach, and Keap gave us enough breathing room to identify the bottlenecks in our production and sales systems. Ultimately, ALL the success MiSyte.com has enjoyed comes back to my decision to purchase Keap in 2014.”

By reimagining how MiSyte.com looked and operated, considerable changes could be made (and executed by Keap) to the overall customer journey, shortening the time needed to convert prospects to customers and turn open invoices into paid invoices. On average, client fulfillment, as a result of utilizing Keap, went from an accounts receivables age of 3 months to 3 weeks.

Keap allowed the MiSyte.com team to refocus on a more profitable client base — small businesses actively seeking to engage in digital marketing — and provide solutions such as sales pages, campaigns, and “done for you” programs that provided monthly revenue for maintenance instead of just “one and done” web design sales.

Jamie was also able to use Keap to shorten the sales process for new clients — attracting new prospects and following up with them automatically. This simple strategy allowed the sales team to focus on prospects who were far more likely to say “yes!” than in previous years.

The fourth quarter of any year is usually slow for many companies, especially in web design and online marketing. In this case, though, simply deploying TWO campaigns — Black Friday and end-of-the-year — resulted in the two best revenue months of the entire year.

Game changing success

In that first year, Jamie discovered that simply using the strategies and technology that Keap builds into every app can generate incredible returns on investment, including:

• Over $30K in new business due to two email campaigns created in the first two months of using Keap
• An immediate cost savings of $300/month through software consolidation
• Far higher sales closing ratios — from 47% to 73% and from eight weeks to five weeks — due to utilizing Keap to nurture prospects
• Growing client base beyond their local geography to include customers in 17 countries as a result of Keap’s automation and functionality
• Reducing accounts receivable aging from 3 months to 3 weeks
• Saving 30 hours per month to focus on growing the business
• Increasing sales year over year by 12x!

Within a year of adopting Keap, MiSyte.com had changed radically. Website builds became only a part of the business. Jamie had not only embraced the idea of using Keap in her business, she became nearly evangelical in her desire to “spread the word” about how automation and digital marketing could truly change the landscape of small businesses. Jamie now teaches other small businesses how to harness the power of sales and marketing automation through her next venture, Keep It Simple Strategies.

Winning plays used by MiSyte.com

• Convert Clients - Re-Engagement Offer
• Convert Clients - Personalized Check In
• Convert Clients - Guide Follow Up + Offer
• Create Fans - Nurture Sequence

Keep It Simple Strategies

Jamie Gilleland is an international speaker, best-selling author, and sales and marketing automation expert who has been involved in sales, marketing, and technology for decades. The results are impressive — thousands of happy clients and millions of dollars in closed sales.

Jamie is one of the most successful Keap Partners in the world, garnering honors not only for sales but also retention. Her strategies and campaigns have been used by some of the biggest names in the coaching industry for one simple reason — they work.

Now, Jamie shares the secrets of business and automation success through her Next Comma Coaching programs, Keep It Simple Strategies, and as a trusted advisor to dozens of companies and businesses around the world. She sits on both the Ignition Partner and Product Advisory Groups for Keap and still makes the time to personally train entrepreneurs and business owners through weekly calls, group coaching, and live training events.

Jamie and her team help business owners and entrepreneurs to grow their businesses in ways they've never imagined — not only through practical advice but also by outlining the exact steps her clients need to take to reach their goals in their own businesses.

Remember, you don’t know what you don’t know, and if you aren’t sure where to start systemizing your own business and processes, you can never scale. Last year, Jamie and her brands helped to account for millions of dollars in closed sales for their clients — how much of that could have been yours? These are solutions that work!

Find Keep It Simple Strategies on the Keap Marketplace